Blog #3-- Universal Reason and Feminist Theory?

Descartes defines universal reason as a version of common sense that is embedded in everybody, and it gives us the capacity for finding universal knowledge. However, as Robin says in his blog post, anything not seen as reasonable is seen as "flawed, weak, feminine, childish, sinful, trivial, and unimportant." 

This ideology relies upon Euro-American settler colonial ideas of the nature and culture (or human) binary. Within this binary, nature is associated with chaos, animals, the feminine, the body, and inhumane behavior/reasoning, and is in essence related to a feminine (or queer) non-white object to be exploited. Culture, on the other hand, is associated with humans, the mind, the masculine, and civilized behavior/reasoning, and can be associated with a white, male actor and exploiter. This framework allows for the subjugation of women, people of color, indigenous people and lifestyles, animals, and natural environments. This subjugation is not an obscure or abstract concept, as most of it occurred explicitly, via slavery, genocide, sexual abuse, and intensive resource depletion. However, notions of the rational, the cultural, and the masculine have led less obvious and apparent, yet equally as pernicious, effects, such as yielding a cyclical system that privileges similar ideologies and modes of knowledge production. Conversely, this also hinders the knowledge and belief systems yielded from women, communities of color, and indigenous communities. Additionally, the body, as site of political, social, and spiritual struggle is discounted, as everything worth study and attention must come from the rational mind, because we don't know if our bodies are tricking us or not. 

The effects of the privileging of the rational mind over the wild, feminine, "savage" body are vast. Overall, this ideology creates a circular, misogynistic logic or totality that encapsulates most aspects of Western political, social, economic, and academic life. However, some environmental and/or material feminists have pursued an alternative to this limiting and inaccurate binary. For example, Nancy Tuana's notion of "Viscous Porosity" and Stacy Alaimo's theory of "Transcorporeality" speak to the ways in which the human/cultural and the natural always interact and intersect, yielding nothing purely natural and nothing purely cultural, and also defining ways in which nature/bodies can and should be understood as agentic and knowledge-containing. Similarly, Donna Haraway creates a theory of Situated Knowledges, in which "vision" (as a metaphor for perception and knowledge) is reclaimed by the subject. Haraway states that vision is always embodied, it always comes from somewhere, and in order to understand the knowledge/insights produced by that knowledge, we need to understand its positionality. Haraway states that a real, imaginable world exists and parts of it can be known through limited and cultural perception, and with humility, understanding nature as having agency. 

I do not think that Descartes intended for his theory of the Cartesian split to be associated with racist, misogynistic, and colonial ideologies. However, I do think it's interesting (and important!) to trace philosophical ideas to practical ramifications and outcomes. Descartes' theory of the Cartesian split between mind and body helped construct a certain idea of humanity (male, rational, right, white, of the mind) that created ideas of the inhuman. Those deemed "less than" the rational subject were usually women, POC, queer folks, and indigenous folks. How else can we explain the dehumanization of entire populations that led to slavery, colonialism, genocide, and witch hunts?